New Selected Poems, By Les Murray

Who else but Les Murray could write a fine poem about the links between a Saxon queen and the Thames Estuary airport proposed by "the jarl of London,/ white-polled Boris"?

Like Seamus Heaney or Derek Walcott, he's an erudite backwoodsman, a boondocks dandy who brings the natural and human worlds of his native rural New South Wales onto the global stage.

A tender bruiser, the veteran Australian maestro is prodigiously gifted in matters of form and language but defiantly plebeian in outlook and instinct.

All those who cherish the voice of "the aberrant, the original, the wounded" should seek out this cornucopian collection from a grand career.